Culture is how employees act when no one is looking; it is how decisions are made when the CEO is not present; it is what holds everyone together through all phases.

Culture is hard to build. It can’t be copied; it can’t be built with pep talks; it can’t be drafted in a weekend culture retreat.

While the academic world is busy researching how to build culture, we can look to institutions that have had a strong culture for many centuries. Can you guess which institutions they are?

Religions teach us much about building culture. Consider two of the major religions – Christianity and Hinduism. While they are fundamentally different, they have a lot in common when it comes to building a long-lasting culture.

Borrowing from these two religions, there are five elements to building a magnetic culture. They are:

• Grand idea
• Rituals
• Stories
• Celebration
• Evangelists

Let us look at each of them.

Grand Idea

A grand idea draws people, and people, in turn, inject life into it. A grand idea is not like a vision statement. A vision statement of a company can be substituted with another company’s vision statement and employees won’t notice the difference. A grand